


Rage into the dying night

by XtaticPearl



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Drabble, Friendship, Gen, Mild Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-17
Updated: 2017-07-17
Packaged: 2018-12-03 10:33:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11530407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/XtaticPearl/pseuds/XtaticPearl
Summary: “Rage against the dying night,” he mutters under his breath and feels Thor breathing out next to him, an added spark to their dimming light of hope.





	Rage into the dying night

Thor’s hair doesn’t blow with the wind anymore; not that there is a lot of wind in space, Tony admits as he eyes the tired but alive man. Mantis is busy arguing with Rocket about the value of rescuing the ‘man floating in space’ and Quill is busy trying to not break the ship with the speed he’s pushing. Drax is eyeing Thor’s axe with dim curiousity, and Tony does not want to even begin wondering why it’s an axe and not Mjolnir. A lot of things have changed since he last saw Thor. A lot of people don’t have things that they thought belonged to them. Shield, team, peace; things get taken or given away carelessly or with too much care. Tony idly wonders if Peter took the new suit from Happy. Maybe he should try another intergalactic call to Queens again.

“I am Groot,” Groot says and Tony has been on the ship long enough to catch the highs and lows of his tone to learn the words behind the same old three. Groot reminds Tony of his bots, just a little less, at times when Tony doesn’t have a claw to hand him a wrench. He shuffles forward and stands beside the teenage plant now, looking down at the disoriented but surely waking Avenger. 

“Loki…” Thor rasps and Tony hears a skip in his own beat but works with it because this isn’t the first time somebody’s called out a name he hates when he wakes them up. 

“Hey there, Thunderbird,” he waves with his gauntlet, watching Thor focus his eyes on Tony, “Whatcha doing floating in space?”

“I escaped the Battleworld,” Thor swallows a wince when he gets up, his body somehow thinner but no less powerful in the flex of his muscles, “The last push of energy knocked me out.”

“Brilliant,” Tony nods at Mantis when she gives him a questioning glance, putting her worry off, “Great. Good adventure, then?”

“Worthy enough,” Thor stretches a little, letting out a cursed exhale when his back twinges before looking back at Tony with clearer eyes and a mild frown, “What are you doing here?”

“Saving the world,” Tony shrugs like it’s everyday business and Thor, he doesn’t react much other than a pause and a nod. Everyday business for him too, clearly.

“Where is the team?” Thor looks around him, taking in the Milano and its occupants, clearly looking for other familiar faces.

“This is the team,” Tony says, no pause in those words, meeting Thor’s sharp gaze head-on as his ex-teammate eyes him in search of a lie. 

“I had…heard,” Thor breathes in and nods slowly, running a scarred hand over his hair before shooting Tony a small hint of a smile, blue in its hope, “I thought it has been a year since.”

“I guess I did the job right this time,” Tony grins, a macabre of the past, echoes of a falling city and dying speedster in it, “Clean break, no shards.”

Thor nods again, like he doesn’t know any other reaction. His eyes drift to his hand twice, seeing something unseen before he looks around again, taking a better account of the people around him.

“I met Banner,” he says and Tony curls a single metal finger beforr relaxing. “We fought. In the Battleworld,” Thor recounts, not giving history because history never told anything but ruins for them. Tony could guess it had something to do with Asgard’s disaster from what Strange had hinted before he left with the Guardians. He could also make a better guess that it has to do with a certain brother. 

“I met Barnes, we fought. In a bunker,” Tony grimaces as he says it because it always makes it seem so stupid, like all wars are. Was a fight between three men called a war? Tony likes to think he has enough dramatics to make it seem as one. 

Thor looks weary but he quirks a tired grin Tony’s way, the way he did after every screw up they did in the past. He remembers seeing Thor grin through blood while getting pummeled by Ultron and remembers himself grinning up from a dead suit while lying in a disaster created by Thor’s brother. 

“There’s a storm coming,” he says because they’re rushing into one and it sounds suicidal to say it that way, and he likes to pretend that he isn’t just that most times. “You heard anything about it?”

“Thanos,” Thor nods and flexes his palms, clenching them around thin air, looking at Tony through a red painted eye, “He seeks to destroy Earth.”

“Cliché,” Tony bobs his head and Thor huffs, a small push of air, “What else do you know?”

“Loki might be helping him,” Thor swallows, just one second of tightness and runs a hand calmly over the handle of his axe.

“Cliché,” Tony repeats and it gets him a small grin, bitter and old but a familiar sight nonetheless.

Tony remembers Thor opening their chapters, all of theirs, by claiming Earth as his to protect in a Mexico desert. He’s sure that Thor remembers Tony closing their chapters by claiming to protect Earth in his lab. And yet here they are, two ends of a journey, wading into a storm.

“The team’s gonna fight,” Tony says, waving his hand around him, “This one, yeah, but also the other one. They know. They’ll fight, wherever they are.”

“They are the Avengers,” Thor agrees and doesn’t add that the name means shit when they are the very reasons for all vengeance usually. It’s okay, Tony thinks, they’re used to living in ironies. 

“You got any more weapons?” Tony asks and Thor’s eyes cloud for a minute, a thousand years of a memory flashing like a lightening bolt in his gaze.

“I can fight,” he says and Tony can hear a pointed avoidance when he needs to. Fighting isn’t the same as fighting with Mjolnir. He knows that. From the way Thor presses down the handle of his axe, he knows it too.

But Tony fought electricity with a car door once. Thor fought a metal Destroyer with a very mortal body once. It’s a foolishly naïve optimism but Tony is here on a spaceship of unknown teammates and Thor is here in a spaceship away from dead friends back home. Foolishly naïve is probably what they’ve always been. 

“We might not walk out of this,” Tony says even as he pulls on his faceplate, looking forward at the explosive space all around them. The pathway to death littered by the stars. 

Thor has watched Tony charge into death twice and charged with him once. He has offered a hand of survival to his brother who stabbed him and has gambled away his freedom in battle. 

He gets up from the cot he was sitting on and stands beside Tony, looking into the stillness of the space that will kill them probably.

“We will fall avenging then,” he says and it’s the cheesiest gallows pep talk Tony has heard ever since Rogers, but Thor is standing next to him, the beginning of their disasters next to his veritable finale of them. He is standing with his eyes towards the future and the past on his shoulders, and Tony nods.

“Rage against the dying night,” he mutters under his breath and feels Thor breathing out next to him, an added spark to their dimming light of hope. 

Together, the disasters marched into the battle of death.

**Author's Note:**

> Just a drabble for my writing warm-up.


End file.
